Walter Cronkite: ‘He still believed in it all’

The
projected image of Walter Cronkite smiled out at a crowd of hundreds of
journalists, family, and friends at a memorial in Manhattan today. From a lectern beneath this
image, President Barack Obama spoke about the late CBS anchor’s steadfast professionalism,
a quality never more needed than today, in the midst of severe political and
financial pressures on journalism.

“This
democracy, Walter said, cannot function without a reasonably informed
electorate,” Obama told the audience at LincolnCenter’s
Avery Fisher Hall. “That’s why the honest, objective, meticulous reporting that
so many of you pursue with the same zeal that Walter did is so vital to our
society. Our future depends on it.”

That
commitment to informing the electorate was deeply held by Cronkite. His belief
that a free press is integral to a free society led him to become honorary
chairman of CPJ—not that it was effortless to bring the legendary anchor onto
our board in the nascent months of the organization in 1981. “It was a long
shot,” CPJ founder Michael Massing told me before the memorial. But once he was
on board, as Executive Director Joel
Simon wrote on our blog, “there was
nothing honorary about Cronkite's involvement with CPJ.”

He
was hands-on, working to gain the freedom of journalists in places such as Argentina and Turkey. Cronkite’s name alone,
Simon wrote, was enough to direct the attention of government leaders to the
dangers journalists face. His name, as so many who paid tribute to him today,
stood for integrity and humanity and, as Katie Couric put it, “a complete and
utter lack of pretense.” Tom Brokaw recounted how, years ago, when reporting in
Israel
he was asked if he was as famous as Walter Cronkite. “No,” he answered. “And I
never will be.”

Cronkite’s
son, Chip, told the audience today that his father felt “it is neither too much
to ask for a free press nor too much for the government to give”—a position embedded
in CPJ’s principles. Former President Bill Clinton, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and
numerous journalists also spoke of Cronkite’s deep well of curiosity and his ability
to lead, with “60 Minutes” correspondent Andy Rooney calling him “a force for
good.”

“He
thought that if we were vigilant and courageous enough, it would all work out,”
said journalist Nick Clooney, a longtime friend of Cronkite’s. “I never saw him
pessimistic. Even at his great age, he still believed in it all.”

Cronkite’s
name remains at the top of our masthead. Its presence reminds us, as his
projected image did today, that a free press matters greatly in a dangerous
world.

Lauren Wolfe is the director of Women Under Siege, a project on sexualized violence and conflict at the Women's Media Center. While CPJ's senior editor, she wrote the CPJ report, "The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists." Previously, she was a researcher on two New York Times books on the 9/11 attacks.

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After reading through the homepage headlines, the story about Walter Cronkite stood out to me most. This is not to say that the others were less important, but just that this story is the one which appealed to a belief that I would like to maintain as well. Even after gaining many years of experience and age, Walter Cronkite's concepts of journalism still seemed highly idealistic. This tells me that after failing,and knowing he would fail again, he never wanted to stop striving to get as close as possible to journalistic perfection. This aspect of character is one that everyone could learn from. We will never reach perfection, but there is a best possible state of being. The closer we get to that, the better off we will be.